Page:Across the Stream.djvu/282

272 course. Indeed, there was nothing else to be done: whether England was going to war or not, dinner-time came round as usual.…

Of them all, it was on Lord Tintagel that the suspense and anxiety beat most strongly, and that because the panic on the Stock Exchanges of Europe threatened him with losses that might bring him within reach of ruin. But Lady Tintagel still clung to a baseless hope, less substantial than a mirage in the desert, that diplomacy would still avert disaster, Archie went about the customary diversions of life with more than usual enjoyment and absorption, while for Jessie there loomed in the immediate foreground a dread and a horror, which, though it concerned not warring millions, but just one individual, engrossed her entire soul.

It was as if she saw him whom she loved with all the strength of her deep and loyal heart in danger of drowning, not in material waters that could but kill the body and set free the soul, but in some awful flooding evil which threatened to submerge and swallow the very source and spiritual life of him. And, all the time, he swam and splashed about in those waters, below which lay hell itself, with the same joyful gaiety as he used to churn his way out to sea at Silorno. As by some hideous irony, the love of deep waters far from shore that all his life had possessed him, so that his physical self was at the zenith of its capacity for enjoyment when the profound gulfs were below him, and the land far off, so now evil, essential and primeval evil, had beckoned his soul out over unplumbed depths that seemed to him bright with celestial sunshine. Not yet was he doomed to sink there, though she guessed, as in a nightmare, in what deadly peril he stood, for now and again some inkling of that which menaced him reached his true self, and he turned back with shuddering and contrition from some evil prompting. All the time this betrayed itself to Jessie in things that might so reasonably have